PARIS - It's 2005 and you're stopped at a traffic light checking your location on the satellite navigation system and sipping nice hot coffee from your heated cup holder. Your wife has her heated seat on high while she is having a conference call...
CARMEL, CA - Yes, Toyota Camry was America's bestselling car in 1997. But Toyotamarketing officials won't be entirely satisfied until the "buff" magazines stop referring to their impeccably competent flagship as an appliance.Now, with the...
The history of diesel engines for passenger cars in the United States is painfully short. They left as quickly as they arrived 20 years ago during the push for fuel-efficient vehicles.Diesels failed for a lot of reasons. They were unreliable. They...
Will Volkswagen AG buy AB Volvo or just try to put it out of the car business? VW and Volvo admit to high-level talks, but both sides insist a complete merger or takeover is not in the cards. That won't stop VW from trying to take away Volvo's...
Cosworth without Ford? That appeared to be the future when Audi AG inked a deal to buy Cosworth Engineering from Vickers plc for $192.3 million. But just one day out of the starting blocks as Cosworth's new owner, Audi peddles the Cosworth Racing...
WARREN, MI - I walk into the headquarters of General Motors Corp.'s Powertrain Group here, and Max Freeman, Powertrain's assistant chief engineer, is in top gear.He and Allen Cline, from Powertrain product engineering, are ready to talk engines ...
It's not exactly a surprise, but Rover Group Chairman Walter Hasselkus confirms that the company will begin selling its Freelander in the U.S. and Canada in 2001. Introduced last fall in Europe, the small SUV - comparable in size to Toyota's RAV4...
PORTLAND, OR - Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America's (MMSA) 1999 Galant, the latest redesigned entry in the ever-crowded midsize sedan segment, is for the first time exactly that - midsized.The previous model, which shared its Mirage stablemate's...
The public relations folks at Chrysler Corp. won't let me tell you how the 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee stacked up against its soon-to-be corporate cousin the Mercedes-Benz ML320 during some muddy boulder-crunching off-road maneuvering last March in...
With Volkswagen AG's Audi Div. about to acquire Cosworth, the British racing-engine and automotive engineering specialty company, some companies' Cosworth services may be left out in the cold. The most notable will be Ford Motor Co. Ford has had a...